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Grits’ byelection night triumph all in the spin

By managing expectations better than their opponents, the Liberals emerged from Monday’s byelections as the clear political winner.

With the help of Liberal spinners, Justin Trudeau (centre) and new Toronto Centre MP Chrystia Freeland (left) were the big winners on byelection night. (Chris Young / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By Robin V. Sears

Tues., Nov. 26, 2013

Political spinners are usually useful in the game of expectations management — but not always. Not so much in shaping perceptions of Question Period, where the media and voters can watch and form their own judgments. And not so much when the spinner is flogging a line that flies in the face of the facts. One feels the pain of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Senate scandal spinners, repeating daily what most Canadians’ common sense tells them to be nonsense.

But byelections are a spinner’s dream. Few national political reporters know much about “flyover” communities like Provencher, Manitoba, so they can be fed spinners’ colourful and compelling tales with ease. Few Canadians or media organizations have any interest in electoral history. So spinners can paint fantastic political landscapes about a history that never actually took place.

This week’s byelections were a triumph of political spin and the gold medal goes to the Trudeau team. They successfully back-footed both the formidable Harper spin machine and the Mulcair team. No seats changed hands, no careers were abruptly ended and none of the results should have been surprising. Yet the red team managed to turn a set of entirely predictable outcomes into triumphs.

That the Tories allowed the race in Brandon to become an existential test of Harper’s hold on the party was simply bad strategic communications on their part. So worried was the Harper team about the outcome and its ramifications that it was planning how to soothe an enraged Tory caucus at its weekly Wednesday meeting.

More seasoned hands — such as the late lamented Tory spin guru Senator Doug Finley — would never have allowed the expectations game to get so badly out of hand. They would have pointed out that governments have lost byelections from the dawn of democracy; that Brandon was a mess after the party bureaucrats bungled a nomination fight; and that the Liberals had the huge advantage of having a still-revered former MP’s son running under their banner. The Tory spin should have been, “If the Liberals can’t win with all those advantages it will be a bad night for Trudeau.”

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But it was the Orange team who got most badly stung by Liberal spin. The two contests in Bourassa in Montreal and in Toronto Centre should have been massive Liberal victories. After all, five years ago when Bob Rae took the seat he won it by 60 per cent! The NDP got 14 per cent. The riding has been red for 44 of the last 60 years. The only Conservatives elected since 1949 were deep red Tories: David Crombie and David Macdonald.

Bourassa is almost a “rotten borough” — as the English call one-party seats. It has been Liberal for 91 years in the last century. With Denis Coderre winning it by 50 per cent in 2008, while the NDP got a mere 8 per cent. What allowed the Liberal spinners to win the battle of expectations was their use of the 2011 results as the reasonable comparator for New Democrats.

Now as delicious as those results in that triumphant final Jack Layton campaign were for the party faithful, normal they weren’t. “Normal” for New Democrats in those ridings is squeaking into double digits, maybe beating the Tories for third place. By allowing recent astonishing results to become the threshold for success, the Mulcair spinners were suckered into a contest they could never win.

If they had not allowed themselves to be pushed into the “close NDP/Liberal fight” narrative before election day, their message could have been, “That the Liberals couldn’t win back their traditional support in these party bastions, even in a byelection, should make them a little scared about the next election. We are very proud that we held onto the high-water mark that Jack Layton established for us for the first time in these Liberal fortresses.”

After all, what really happened Monday night? First, two out of three voters stayed home, turnout was cut in half, a slap at every party’s organization. Second, the Liberals’ percentage went up in Toronto — and so did the NDP’s! In Montreal, the NDP held onto its astonishing 2011 vote. In Brandon, the Tories pulled a victory out of a disaster, through their famous campaign discipline. That none of those stories were part of your favourite media outlet’s coverage is not entirely their fault — they were successfully spun by a very professional Trudeau team.

The message for each of the parties is a very old but still powerful political axiom: Manage expectations and you will always be a winner.

Robin Sears is a Principal with The Earnscliffe Strategy Group and a retired NDP spinner.

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